Misericorde
by Nookienostradamus
Summary: As much as Will Graham is pale and retiring before others, he is prismatic in Hannibal's view. A seething garden to rival all the temptations set before Saint Anthony by the hosts of Hell. It smells of sweet decay; Will is sick with it. And Hannibal is determined to teach Will to want it. Or, rather, show him he already does. (Casefic)
1. Chapter 1

By some accounts, Will Graham is not much to look at. Objectively, he could be judged attractive. But his mannerisms-his refusal to make eye contact, his speech marred by bowed head and stumbling tongue-sap any charisma. Will projects himself as the leavings of a human being, consumed within and showing only ashes.

Despite the uneasy trainees who make quiet and half-ashamed jokes behind his back after class, Will is not repellent to everyone. Those who have the time and tools to dig past the crumbling excrescence and into the live coals below find themselves marked by him.

Alana Bloom, for instance.

Hannibal Lecter, though he likes to think he has a special appreciation for the piece of condemned property that is Will Graham.

Even Jack Crawford.

In fact, the BAU chief has told Hannibal as much, over dinner one night (a ragoût with the sherry-braised sweetbreads of a hardware-store sales assistant who also had an unsettling habit of exposing himself to children in parks).

Crawford said, through the cool smile and hooded eyes that Hannibal has come to know means he is indulging in self-satisfaction, that looking at Will is like looking at the work of Paul Klee. "He doesn't so much make up a person as represent one in public," Jack continues.

Hannibal gives an indulgent smile even at Crawford's mispronunciation of the artist's name. An intriguing but somewhat puerile comparison, Klee. Blocks of unknowing color, suggesting a form more melancholy than its component parts.

_Trite, trite, trite._

Hannibal raises his glass toward his guest, conveying tacit praise for his insight.

Crawford might just as well have referenced Claude Monet, which Hannibal finds just as banal. He prefers figurative work, precise cuts across canvas compared with the oozing emotionality of the abstract.

Hannibal makes a polite sound that might be assent, or just acknowledgement that the other man is speaking.

And he looks upon the composite inside his mind evoked by the name "Will Graham." Because he does not see like other men.

For all his appreciation of the old masters, a man is not a painting. Hannibal sees a mind in multidimensional renderings, on all planes at once. Each attribute is both partitioned, hard and sharp like stained glass, and at the same time collapsing in on itself, falling through every hue imaginable and some unimagined. Eye-like tunnels ringed with shades of themselves in an annular drift toward black singularity.

It is riotous, exultant, and would no doubt kill a man without the resources to take it in and process it. Kill him, or run him mad.

Both of these things Hannibal would like to watch. Perhaps it will happen to Crawford before Hannibal himself must kill the man. An observer is a knowing catalyst, or so said Heisenberg. At least on the quantum level.

And thus, as much as Will Graham is pale and retiring before others, or a mosaic before Jack Crawford, he is prismatic in Hannibal's view. A seething garden to rival all the temptations set before Saint Anthony by the hosts of Hell. It smells of sweet decay; Will is sick with it. And it takes as little as the effortless slide of a fingernail below the surface of his tenuous calm to set the corruption blooming on his skin.

Mesmerizing. All the more so because he is intent on teaching Will to want it. Or, rather, showing him that he already does.

It will be an entertainment-symphonic in scope-not like the little baroque fillips of pleasure he draws from pretending to help the FBI with its little puzzles.

Though he does not know it yet, the composition of this particular work begins in his office, where he allows Will close to free rein to explore his demesne. The marble columns are polished to a high shine by swift, quiet cleaning teams in starched whites. The paintings and prints are museum-mounted, set behind spotless plexiglas. Spectral lines-himself and his patients-skim the curves of the sterling silver tea service. All is reflective, but distorts in some way. This is not accidental.

Hannibal sips at a snifter of Le Diciotto Lune Stravecchia Grappa, watches as Will stops pacing next to a rosewood pedestal holding a glass-topped case.

"That looks wicked," says Will.

Hannibal holds off only a moment, savoring the anticipation, before going to join him, to watch the planes of his sunken face move over the dagger nestled in velvet.

"That," he tells Will, "is a misericorde. It was used to dispatch wounded and suffering knights on the field of battle. The blade had to be thin and strong enough to slip between the plates of armor, but long enough to pierce the heart through. Medieval euthanasia."

"Misery as in 'putting them out of?'" Will asks.

"It is a false cognate. Misericorde from the Latin, 'misericordia.' Meaning 'mercy.'"

Will favors the box with a rare smile, but it is the reflection that Hannibal sees, and smiles just out of the sight of its glass eye.

"Would you like more wine?" Hannibal asks. It is a superfluous question; the liquid in the glass is at the same level it was half an hour ago.

Will shakes his head and moves away.

Hannibal knows Will does not like to be physically close to others, for the most part. But he has begun to tolerate Hannibal's presence in his personal space for limited periods of time, now. Proximity is knowledge to Hannibal, to smell is to know, to couple a full picture with that provided by his preternatural sight. So he has insinuated himself within that sphere, extending deliberate comfort, like reaching out to a stray.

No.

He thinks of Will's dogs, the primal, trusting things. The stench. An ugly comparison, in retrospect. That Will Graham surrounds himself with the unendurable makes the prize that he is shine more brightly by comparison.

Will's phone rings from the depths of his cardigan pocket. Wine or no wine, the point is now moot, as he answers it.

Hannibal lets his breath out in a measured, soundless stream.

"Jack," Will says when he ends the call. "He's out near Norfolk."

"I will assume he wants you to join him."

"He does."

"I will let you take your leave, then." Hannibal holds out his hand for the wine. Will slides the stem of the glass between Hannibal's third and fourth fingers, a bloody lily perched on his outstretched palm. Both he and Will watch the liquid shudder in the glass, a very deliberate tremor.

"Cold today," Will says, apropos of nothing.

Hannibal lowers the glass. In the other hand he still holds the snifter of grappa. The ridges on Will's wide-wale corduroys ripple, magnified though one glass, then the other. Will won't be looking at Hannibal's face, so he won't notice he's being observed.

"I'll get going, then" Will says, running a hand through his hair, forcing a laugh. One knuckle catches in a tangle, then is released.

"We'll take my car down, yes?" Hannibal says.


	2. Chapter 2

If it was tending toward coolness in the D.C. metro area, southern Virginia had yet to catch on that it was autumn.

Will sheds his jacket, wrinkles his nose.

For the first time, Hannibal notes the color and density of the hair on Will's forearms: fine, reddish.

The reek that hangs in the humid air is, indeed, astonishing, but it is nothing Hannibal has not smelled before. Nor Will, for that matter, though he squints and flinches into it as though the stench is a sharp wind in his face.

Jack Crawford stands to one side of the porch, next to some representative or other from local law enforcement. The sour twist to Crawford's mouth could have its origin in the smell, or the circumstance. Hannibal knows both Jack and the type of man that Jack is: driven to pursue and compete by an irritation below his skin, finding no pleasure in resolution. He will not rest, but neither will he flay himself on the flinty edges of a case simply to get at that all-consuming itch. Hannibal finds Crawford's arrogance in presuming himself indispensable in perpetuity extremely distasteful. Most especially when it is Will who bend without complaint to slide along the razor, silent grace in self-evisceration, all for Crawford's benefit.

He hurries in to watch Will at work. Only in these moments, brought on by the first throbbing hammer-blows of raw horror, is Hannibal certain that Will's vision is kaleidoscopic as his own.

Here, in the throes of his talent, is where punctilious stuffed suits like Crawford assume Will is most vulnerable. He must be, yes? To open up and channel murderous intent through his very body?

But no, no. Employing his gift is where Will is strongest; where, if Hannibal could feel anything that approaches fear, that approach would be laid down. Only later, when the torrent has pounded through him like a flood-swollen river and left its strange and sharp debris, does Will become vulnerable. Where he will be taught to depend on Hannibal, to crave the careful lancing of the sores that debris leaves in its wake.

Hannibal shivers with pleasure.

Inside the small rural home, Will squats at the edge of a pool of black blood. It obscures the pattern of a cheap and ugly rug. At its center lies a man, more or less.

His waxen skin is shot through with black veins where the stilled blood lays corrupted. He is beginning to bloat. Eyelids have swollen closed over milky corneas, but the rictus of his open mouth is still apparent. Hannibal passes a few seconds counting the man's fillings.

The corpse's shirt is sliced open, and below it, his paunchy belly. An attempt has been made to close the incision by binding the trunk around with nylon rope. The jaundiced hue of abdominal fat is bright against old blood.

A very long way off, a too-early cricket tries to herald evening.

It does not obscure Will Graham's murmuring.

"It's over quickly, more quickly than I want," Will says. "His suffering is important, but it is not the reason I am here. The reason is the message. The message is inside him. I wrap him like a present and I wait."

A pause. A look that is both stricken and welcoming.

"We are meant to see, meant to discover," Will says. "If the body itself was what we are supposed to see, then he would be left open."

"Bared in every way," is Hannibal's soft rejoinder.

Will's eyes roll, ecstatic. His breath hitches. Hannibal is put in mind of the early Christian mystic Hildegard von Bingen, the bright blade of her epilepsy cleaving her brain and sending music and poetry tumbling forth. She gave the name of God to her affliction.

Will is equally transported. How Hannibal would like to be behind his eyes, to watch the rude rural house fade and the construction of the crime take its place, billowing to life in atomic machinations. He sighs; it is almost too much.

At the shabbily appointed regional medical examiner's office, everyone had jumped backward when the technician's careful severing of the nylon cord revealed what lay hidden in the dead man's belly. Everyone except Will; he knew to expect something, knew it would be terrible, nightmare-inducing.

Utterly perfect for Hannibal's purposes.

He now sits with Will in the equally shabby antechamber of the coroner's office. The very air trembles, a vibrato that washes over Hannibal's calm immunity. Will sighs, and sighs, and sighs again, leaving the local techs to zip up the poor, ruptured body.

Bodies, in fact.

The secret within the man had begun to erupt forth as soon as the first bindings were cut. The technicians in the room-even Jack-fell prey to a startle response, and the concatenation of near-instantaneous ghastly recognition. The organs within the corpse's abdominal cavity had been shifted, compacted, but what sprung out first from the widening incision was no part of a recognizable internal structure. It was, instead, a tiny hand.

"Do you know why you-why our killer-put the infant in the victim's abdomen?" Hannibal asks, keeping his tone light and neutral.

"Fetus," Will says, without looking up. "It wasn't an infant. It was pre-term."

This Hannibal knows, of course. "Ah," he said, "so we are searching for at least one other victim."

"Yes."

"Tell me what else you know, Will."

"It's symbolic. Possibly religious. In fact, more than likely religious. I'll know more when we get the ID back on the vic."

"Could it be personal, as well?" Hannibal asks.

"Of course it's personal." Will spits the words. It comes out of frustration, although not with Hannibal.

Hannibal is his bellwether. The soothing hand on the shoulder of Will's worn jacket-donned against the vicious air conditioning of the coroner's office-says as much. For all that the atmosphere shudders in the wake of discovery, Will's shoulder is solid, rising and falling with slow breaths. He is still struggling to extract shreds of himself from the killer's mind. Later will come the night terrors, the indisputable need for reassurance. Hannibal conveys that promise with his hand as well.

"Sorry," Will says.

"There is no need for apology."


	3. Chapter 3

The victim, they learn, is the owner of the house in which he was found. Fifty-one-year-old Paul Hebert, a local OB/GYN. Unmarried and, by the look of his living quarters, sliding with little protest toward terminal bachelordom.

Hannibal watches the facets of possibility inherent in that discovery-homicidally disgruntled patients, vengeance-bent professional rivals-unfold and surface briefly behind Will's eyes, until he rejects them out of hand. A controlled surge of admiration expands within Hannibal's chest. Will is fathoms beyond Crawford, having already processed and discarded a web of possible paths. His gift is surgical, even in eminently unsteady hands.

When the good doctor's tearful office assistant divulges that Hebert did pro bono work at a family planning clinic just outside of Smithfield...that is when Will's focus draws taut. And again, Hannibal sighs, to himself. Will Graham is such a study. His face dances to the tunes played by the devils in his head; he hasn't hands enough to cover the weeping wounds that open across the expanse of his flesh as he works. They wink and spill unwitting secrets.

Panoptes, in Greek mythology, was a giant whose body was covered with eyes. The appropriateness of the parallel fills Hannibal with pleasure, and his hand itches to draw. Instead, he adjusts the knifepoint peak of his pocket handkerchief.

"Digital forensics is going through Hebert's computer," Will tells Hannibal, later, on the long, dark drive back upstate. "For hate mail, something like that. They're not going to find anything. This is someone who had close contact, even day-to-day contact, with the vic."

Torn between watching Will and watching the road, Hannibal sees the occasional light from the evenly spaced street lamps along the expressway throw a shadow caricature of Will's profile, over the car's central console and his lap.

"How do you figure?" he asks.

Will shakes his head and grimaces, as he does when thinking. "It's too hands-on. Executed carefully. Lovingly, even. Insofar as anyone who cuts a woman open and takes out her unborn child can love."

"Not everyone is capable of it," Hannibal says. "What they mistake for love is often only entanglement."

That brings a smile from Will, yellow and feral in the streaming sodium light. "That's what I'm getting at. He's entangled."

Will's long, unkempt gravel driveway is hell on even the pristine shocks of Hannibal's Bentley. Nevertheless, he pulls up close to the house, close enough to watch the ecstatic ritual that is the dogs' greeting. In the golden light of the entryway, he wades amid the teeming bodies, palms facing downward, a saint among lepers and penitents.

Will does not look out, back toward the car. Nor will he. He is released for the day from Jack Crawford, but he is far from released. Inside the car, Hannibal inclines his head, a salute or an acknowledgement. He tries not to think on the platter of reconstituted muck that will constitute Will's dinner, if he eats at all.

As for himself, Hannibal finds it is never too late to expend energy on dining well. He is thinking of pan-frying translucent slices of cardiac muscle, folding the crisp-brown edges over fine sesame lavash, slathered with tahini and tarragon. In his mind, he sees the place in his cold storage pantry where the meat lies, sealed against time and intrusive organisms.

A heart he had frozen long ago.

The following day, just before Hannibal ushers his three-thirty appointment into the office, he sees the amber light at the top of the telephone blink on. A missed call. Halfway into the session, the light begins to blink. Another call, directly to voicemail.

He indulges the bipolar woman, Annette Leeds, with ten minutes' additional time past the session's set ending, despite knowing he will have to gently cut her off even then. At times, Hannibal dislikes giving in to the urgency of others. Part of his play is spiteful, of course. Will did not call the night before, though the debut of any case brings with it mental wanderings of excruciating vividness. Will lies in bed, only the snuffling and shifting of countless canine bodies reaching his ears now that summer's last crickets have died, and dreams behind his waking eyes.

The profiler chose to pass the night uninterrupted by outside voices, and this displeases Hannibal. Still, when Annette trundles out, he closes and locks the door, checks the telephone number, and calls Will back.

"Almighty Hands Church is picketing a vigil for Dr. Hebert in Reston tonight," Will begins, without greeting or introduction.

Hannibal thumbs the chiseled tip of a Derwent 2B pencil. "How was your night?"

"What?"

"Did you sleep at all, Will? You need your sleep."

"Some. A little. Do you know Almighty Hands?"

Hannibal begins to sketch on the pad before him. A single finger from the third phalanx upward, with a short and ragged nail. "Very vocal opponents of women's rights, though I seem to remember there are women in the congregation."

"Not just women's rights. Abortion rights in particular," Will says. "They operate out of Emporia. They have reps out at our vic's clinic almost on a daily basis."

"Also rather vocal in favor of capital punishment." Hannibal smiles. "I can't say I'm a fan."

"Nobody is," Will says. "But it's very possible that someone in that congregation had it out for Hebert if they saw him going in the clinic."

"Why the woman? Why her child, then?"

"It just feels domestic to me. I can't explain it."

"You needn't."

"Maybe there was infidelity involved," Will says. "This organization is not exactly known for its tolerance. One man's wife steps out on him, carries another man's child, maybe. It's enough to send him over the edge. Far enough over to use her murder as a way to bring his less-than-divine judgment down on the doctor."

"Men kill stupidly for love, and for religion," Hannibal says. "Sometimes it is one and the same. Do you know Gerard Manley Hopkins?"

"Does he work for BAU?"

"Never mind. You were saying?"

"I was saying I could really use your...expertise," Will says.

He might almost have said, _your company_, Hannibal thinks. "How so?"

"You read people. Well."

"As do you, Will. I doubt I would be of much more use to you than your own faculties. Their trade is in faith, you should not show them doubt." His tone is chiding, but gentle. "I have responsibilities to my other patients."

"I never said I was a patient."

"You certainly are not, in a typical sense. Perhaps it is insistent old Uncle Jack that you need a buffer for," Hannibal suggests.

"I can handle Jack," Will says, dismissive. Defensive.

"Please call me afterward, Will. Yes?"

The noise from the other end of the line suggests assent. Will is already removed, the great, catastrophic swell of empathy loosed again from its rickety confines.

Knowing what he knows, and doing what he does, Hannibal at times finds himself at odds with his own best interests, at least as a pleasing intellectual exercise. The people he treats, aside from Will, of course, have made threat and wonder their silent adversaries. Their timorous creeping through life utterly belies their complete inability to anticipate disaster around each corner. Will, on the other hand, is allowed a look into unfettered abandon, what happens when someone gives up caution and leaps from the precipice.

But aren't they really all banal in their own ways, as well? These sad, sick lives that lurch into incidental brilliance for a moment or two. Projecting grandiosity, but truly just suffering from poverty of imagination. The work of most of these workaday horrorists the FBI busies itself with is recursive, finite, self-referential.

Hannibal nurtures an abstracted longing to show Will the work of an authentic visionary, though it would mean placing himself on the altar. His own work draws on diverse sources, some so unconnected as to seem ludicrous to any mind but that which created it. Hannibal's œuvre is no _curriculum mortis_ of stagnating accomplishment. It is a breathing thing, merely described by death.

And for all of his voracious curiosity, he has no interest in meeting another of his peculiar stature, if ever there were one. Tobias Budge, perhaps, could have been. Perhaps not. They had only the briefest time for familiarization.

Rather, he cherishes Will's keen sight, even though he can only display the liminal edge of that which would make it finally worthy of the torment it causes Will. Hannibal's gifts are the completion of Will's, and it must suffice that on some rudimentary level the other man knows it.


	4. Chapter 4

When Will calls, late in the day, Hannibal invites him for dinner.

"Can't," he says. The reply is curt, but not out of character for a preoccupied Will.

Preoccupied, Hannibal reminds himself. Not jilted. Still, he allows a few seconds' appreciation. Turnabout is fair play. "Has there been a development?" he asks.

"We found her."

"Whom? Our killer's first victim?"

"Yes," says Will. "The woman. Both she and her husband are dead."

"And the killer?"

"Local law enforcement has an APB out."

"I see," says Hannibal. "Are you at Quantico, then?"

"Yeah."

"Well, if you would prefer to attend to your vigil alone, I will let you be. What phantoms we meet on our lonely watches. 'Murder most foul, as in the best it is; But this most foul, strange and unnatural.'"

Will's brittle laugh is a puff of breath into the phone. "You're quoting Hamlet at me now? Is that meant to imply something, Dr. Lecter?"

"Not at all," says Hannibal, smiling. "The words were simply at my disposal. As I am at yours. If you're willing to wait, I will bring dinner to you."

"That would be great," Will says.

"Don't spoil it with something from those awful Academy vending machines."

"You have my word."  
>*<p>

Given preparation time and the distance between them, it is just under three hours before Hannibal arrives in Will's office at the FBI Academy. There are no trainees to stare askance at the generous basket he holds. It will be a sort of ploughman's dinner, cold but fresh. Prosciutto (the cured vastus medialis of the thigh of a hotel bellman) with melon and mint; bitter herb compote; cavern-aged Délice de Bourgogne cheese; sourdough bâtard. Hannibal does _not_ microwave. But he doubts very much he will encounter any objection to his offering, especially considering the sacrifice of one of his bottles of Le Montrachet Grand Cru-so dry it stills the tongue for a moment.

Will favors him with a look that pleases Hannibal tremendously when he enters the office. It is full of fuzzy semi-recognition: the look of a man so long adrift that he is unable to recognize imminent rescue. Will Graham does not crave landfall, fortunately. He only wants an anchor in the waves.

After a few long moments, realization, even fondness, pushes away the fog over his eyes as Hannibal moves toward him, solicitous. Will looks at him with weary gratitude as he sets out the spread, each piece in its place. Presentation is everything.

"So, ah-" Hannibal inches the fragrant cork out of the neck of the bottle of Le Montrachet, hands deft even wielding a waiter's corkscrew. "Tell me about the first victim. The one you found today."

"Victims. Plural." Will slides the tines of his fork through a sliver of meat. Even without the melon underneath, the flesh shows a lovely sunset pink. Will stares at his plate, silent, but Hannibal knows he is not being ignored.

Still, he says, "You don't have to say anything if it disturbs you too much. There are things we would all rather not remember."

"Lisa Tunney, and her new husband, Jake Tunney. He was shot in the head, point-blank, but she was cut up. Butchered. She was hardly recognizable as human anymore," Will says. He lifts the fork and places the food on his tongue. A scrap of meat protrudes for only a moment from the corner of Will's mouth, and Hannibal watches until it is licked away. "This is really good," Will says, chewing. "Of course it is."

Hannibal nods, crushing the sharp salt tang of the meat into the sweetness of the fruit with his molars. He has long since forgiven the other man's propensity for talking mid-bite. And the food is too good; he has suppressed his own hunger, which is not typical. Even after curing, the slightest scent of the butchered man lingers in his remains. It's not unpleasant. If the bellhop knew he was to be so elevated, so transformed...there are reasons why both physical and mental acts of chewing and digesting lie along the road to mastery.

"Who is the man the police are searching for?" Hannibal asks.

"Lisa Tunney's ex. Nicholas Arendt. They were both members of Almighty Hands."

"Were?"

"Apparently you can't get a divorce and stay in the good graces of Lewis Beinert. The leader."

"Yes, I recognize the name," Hannibal says.

"He was there, at the memorial for Hebert," says Will. "Had kids-eleven, twelve years old-holding signs with all these pictures. Dead babies, parts of babies, your typical anti-abortion sensationalist material. Quite probably faked. His wife was there, Beinert's wife. It's obvious she's undergoing chemotherapy. She was weak, in a wheelchair. Just this phantom with no lips or eyebrows. But dragged out and telling anyone who will listen exactly how hot the fire is that Dr. Hebert is roasting over in Hell. Crazy."

"But not the kind of crazy you're looking for," says Hannibal.

Will laughs. "No, not that kind. At least I don't think so." He takes a too-large swallow of the wine, and Hannibal grimaces as his throat works to conquer it.

"Beinert doesn't hesitate to sell out Arendt, though. Strikes him as perfectly sane that divorce is on par with murder in the eyes of his god. If he's done one, he's capable of anything."

"His god?"

"I'm not having a religious discussion with you. Or anyone," Will says, transferring a glistening trail of cool golden wine from his lips to the back of his hand. "Not right now."

"Very well. So this Beinert is not a suspect?" Hannibal asks.

"I doubt he has the physical strength. Maybe to overpower Lisa Tunney, but not Paul Hebert. He's very old. He has an alibi, anyway. Caring for his wife. And it's pretty clear that Lisa was seeing another man before they split. I'm pretty certain the child isn't-wasn't-Arendt's."

"Ah," says Hannibal. "As you suspected. Motive."

"Motive." With shaking fingers, Will folds a slice of thigh atop a piece of the bread smeared thick with cheese. Its translucent edge fans out beside Will's nose, gathering light from the overhead fluorescent panels, as he sinks his teeth in.

The pale and metallic scent of the wine effervesces, and Hannibal drinks it in as readily as the liquid itself, closing his eyes in perfect contentment.

Only a few moments later, Will's phone rings. The idyll is over.

He answers, listens.

"Jack, I assume," Hannibal says when he has ended the call.

Will nods. "We got him."

Hannibal stands, sweeping a hand over the remnants of the meal. "I'll tidy up."


	5. Chapter 5

After they both leave, it is a few days before he sees Will again. Hannibal does not call, but waits, preparing to extend his arms, receive whatever charred bits drift into his embrace. The call he receives comes not from Will, but from Jack Crawford. He is not surprised.

"Do you have any pressing appointments today, Dr. Lecter?"

"Nothing I can't reschedule. What do you need?"

"I need you here. You can say it's as a consultant, but I need you to prop Will up. Help him cope. There's been another murder."

"Oh, dear," Hannibal says. "Another doctor?"

"Another woman. Cut up just like Lisa Tunney. That probably means we don't have much time before we've got yet another victim on our hands."

"I understand. Please give me your location, and I'll be there as soon as I can."

Hannibal understood the implications of Crawford's entreaty as soon as he had picked up the phone. If the nature of Will's empathy is such that he can slide in stiletto-thin behind the eyes of his quarry (for he, also, is a hunter, in a way), that empathy is also his stumbling block when he withdraws. He has admitted in the past to feeling guilty, responsible for deaths he had nothing to do with, trailing the tatters of an already tattered personality when he snaps back into himself. The burden must be unimaginable, Sisyphean, as he faces the feeling of direct causality.

They got the wrong man. Another person has died. Will turns inward, and sees fault.

Hannibal, as he stands in a fragrant shower (Dr. Hauschka's Blackthorn body wash; a pre-shave preparation by Hommage for his face-he likes the closest possible shave), also sees fault. A great tectonic rift sliding apart inside Will. He is more open, even, than the corpse of Dr. Paul Hebert, not bound by secrets or intent. Hannibal's steady surgeon's hands will reach inside that wailing cavity, massage the organs back to health, will wield needle and sutures, blot up the blood. But such reconstitution is as good as a chemical change; what is put back together is not the same as the sum of its fallen components.

The scene he drives into is a trailer park where uniformed police, agents, and forensics experts stand scattered like columns in a field of ruins. They shift and sway, uncomfortable. Will Graham, seated on the concrete steps before the front door of one of the trailers, is the epicenter of their trembling.

Crawford gives Hannibal a look, his lips drawn in a tight line.

"Will," Hannibal says, crouching beside him. "I'm here."

Will only shakes his head. His eyes are flat and blank.

"It's Nicholas Arendt's girlfriend," Crawford says. "Caroline Fitzsimmons."

"Arendt is the man you brought in for his wife's murder?" Hannibal asks. "For Hebert?"

"Yeah. Quite obviously Arendt wasn't here, as he's been in holding for three days. A neighbor called it in. Said she heard screaming, a struggle."

"She described it as a 'ruckus,'" Will says, grimacing. "That's _important_." A humorless laugh punches out of his gut.

From where he kneels beside Will, Hannibal looks up at Crawford, who gives the smallest shake of his head. He is afraid Will might see, but the man sees nothing now. Registers nothing. He is hard at work below a calm exterior, going about the business of quiet self-immolation.

Hannibal watches the flames in his face, but he finds he does not care for it. However luminous Will may be when he removes his glasses and steps into the persona of a killer, this culpable self-consumption makes him wan-a bare bulb to a star.

"She fought back," Will says. "Fought hard. But not hard enough."

"May I look?" Hannibal asks.

The scent of blood is so rich inside the tiny trailer that it seems the air itself is made of it. Splashes discolor a small dining table, the cheap polyester cushion on a chair, but the concentration of it is in the kitchen, where the smell mixes with that of greasy, day-old dishes, many of which are on the floor. The woman is slumped against the cupboards. Her eyes are open only a slit. Blood has fountained from her midsection and across the splayed remnants of the t-shirt she wears. One hand, crosshatched with defensive wounds, lies palm-up, fingers crooked toward the door, inviting the inspection Hannibal plans.

He draws a pair of nitrile gloves from the inside breast pocket of his suit jacket and pulls them on. The butchery was hasty and haphazard, but he can see right away that the primary aim was accomplished. The bisected uterine wall is thickened, the organ expanded. She had been pregnant, but only just.

Hannibal strips off the gloves, folding them in on themselves and tucking them away again.

Standing, he sees a generous spray of blood high in the corner of one cabinet. Too high for it to have come from the woman on the floor as no major blood vessels appear to be cut. She likely went into shock well before she exsanguinated. But it does mean she got a solid shot in on her attacker before she succumbed. With any luck, he was concussed and seeking treatment.

"Have you notified area hospitals?" Hannibal asks Crawford as he emerges from the trailer. The day is cool and cloudless.

"Yes. We've had a couple of false leads. Nothing after that." With a noise of disgust, Jack Crawford slaps his palms against the legs of his slacks, as if he is trying to brush something off of his hands.

"Will," Hannibal says. "Where is he leading you? Our killer?"

Will digs at his eyes with the heels of his hands, as if to crush out his visions, break them apart for a moment of reprieve. "In a circle."

"No," Hannibal says. "The woman was pregnant. Ten, perhaps eleven weeks."

At this, Will's head snaps up.

"Our killer is facing a forked path," Hannibal continues. "He may or may not know that Arendt is in law enforcement custody, but either way, he knows Arendt's name has been cleared. If this truly is a Biblical expunging of sin, then the killer must return for Arendt, just as he killed Lisa Tunney's husband. Leviticus states that both the adulterer and the adulteress must be put to death."

"You said, 'a forked path,' doctor," says Crawford. "What is the other path?"

"Another abortion provider," Will says. "Maybe someone else at the clinic. I don't think he knew Caroline was pregnant until he cut her open. But this is a new opportunity. For expansion. We're looking at a million possibilities."

Hannibal resists the urge to smile. He hears the desperation in Will's voice, but the single razor beacon of re-igniting insight suffices to assure him that Will is stumbling toward the correct orientation.

"I'm not releasing Arendt," says Crawford. "Not yet."

"Then you are limiting the killer's options, certainly" Hannibal says.

"We don't know what he knows," Will says.

Crawford cuts in. "I'm not using Arendt as bait."

Will's sudden and bone-grinding fury sets his shoulders in a rigid line, but goes unnoticed by anyone but Hannibal.

"Just a little more," he tells Will, "then you can rest."

"Rest," Will says, sneering.

"Where is he now?" Hannibal asks, letting his fingertips hover just above Will's shoulder blade.

Will breathes in, long and steady, closing his eyes. "Talking to God. Offering up his work."

Jack Crawford is holding his phone to his ear. "I want local PD on high alert around all family planning clinics in the state, and DC as well," he says, and stabs at the screen, cutting off the call. "We're en route to Almighty Hands. Dr. Lecter, you can come if you want."


	6. Chapter 6

There are no living things inside the white clapboard church building on Penderson Road in Emporia, Virginia, but the light itself appears to possess some agency. It shivers, bisected by leaf-shadows, in splinters of red, blue, green, gold from the cheaply made stained glass panes flanking the vestibule. It trickles over the pews from the high, narrow windows in the nave, and rolls back and forth-tidelike-with the rare passing cloud.

The building is fairly new, but designed to evoke the bucolic, a disingenuousness Hannibal finds repellent. Only the figure of the crucified Christ over the altar ventures to meet his peculiar aesthetic, and that is only because it sits at such odds with its surroundings. It is set into a recessed portion of the back wall, flanked with long velvet banners that buffer it from the quavering light spilling over the altar steps. The figure itself-made of resin or heavy plastic-has been painted by someone with no grasp of color theory. Either that, or it was overpainted in what could have been a caricaturish copy of a Goya.

Sick-looking orange, meant to suggest sunlit flesh, falls off into unforgiving purple shadows beneath the Savior's eyes, pooling in his sunken cheeks and underneath each protruding rib. His mouth, a black cavern ringed by a fence of white teeth that strains the trickles of painted blood from his thorn-pricked brow.

For a few long moments as he watches Will step into the nave, watches his gaze lurch toward the crucified figure and stay-in repugnance or wonder-Hannibal does not notice he is holding his breath. Multicolored panels of light like a tile puzzle shift over Will's face as he stares. He is moving while motionless, skin crawling, hair in flames.

And as Hannibal lets the breath out, slow, the garish Christ becomes no more than a sketch of itself: faded, receding. In his static agony he is shamed by Will's suffering, which is alive. Hannibal brushes two fingertips against the knot of his silk tie without having realized he has raised his hand to his throat.

"Well, that's just fucking creepy," says one of the agents at the door, and the moment crumbles.

Only a very solid hold on his temper and the lack of an available weapon prevents Hannibal from turning and opening the man's throat. Even Crawford gives a disapproving look.

But the agent's comment means Will is able, though with obvious difficulty, to wrench himself out of his transported state. The shake of his head is so subtle it looks like a tremor. "We should check the house."

Lewis Beinert opens the door of the small house behind the church with protests on his lips. "We have done nothing wrong," he says. "We're protected by the First Amendment."

"As to your first comment, that's debatable," says Crawford. "Still, there's been another murder. Another pregnant woman. Someone carved her up, just like they carved up your former church member Lisa Tunney-Lisa Arendt, as you knew her. Butchered her like a sow and cut the child out of her belly."

"Lord Jesus preserve and protect us," Beinert whispers. "Have you asked her husband?"

"Her husband is Nicholas Arendt," says Crawford, "well, the father of that child. And he has been in lockup-in our custody-since Monday. There is no way he murdered that woman. So I'm going to need you to be a little more open about what, exactly, you and your church members do."

Hannibal almost admires the way Crawford uses the temporary flagging of Beinert's indignation to push past the man and into the house. The momentary notion is pushed away by a rush of stale air that comes through the door. Hannibal scents a singular perfume: very slow death, and running through it like a mineral vein, the thin, arousing top note that can only be blood. Will is suppressing a grimace; he senses it, too, though he may not entirely grasp the exquisite interplay of the blend's components.

Inside the house, the only thing that does not look worn or ragged is a hospital-style bed. The painful optic white of the sheets is aggravated by sunlight from a side window, but the bed is empty.

A woman calls from another room with a thin, medically destroyed voice. "Lewis?"

Beinert's brow creases in almost comical confusion. Hannibal is hard-pressed to imagine by what method this man has earned the respect of his following. Shifting eyes under a shock of white hair, a tendency to stoop and to rub hands so knobbed with rheumatism they are landscapes unto themselves. Overalls, a faded work shirt. If Lewis Beinert inspires, it can only be disdain.

The woman's voice sounds again from down the short, dark hallway.

"This is really not a good time," Beinert says. "My wife is very ill, and our son was involved in an accident at work."

"Is he here? Your son?" Will asks, his sudden attentiveness brittle and strained.

"Yes, my wife is looking after him. I'll need you all to come back another time," he says, though he does nothing to usher the company of agents out.

"I'm a doctor," Hannibal says. "Perhaps I should take a look at him."

Beinert takes in Hannibal's suit-the double Windsor, the knife pleats of his worsted slacks-face a map of doubt.

"He really is a doctor," Crawford says.

"I was a surgeon," says Hannibal. "Now I practice psychiatry. And so I understand mistrust of doctors. But this should be no reason not to get your son proper medical attention."

Watching Beinert process information is wearing at Hannibal's patience. The man thinks with the great grinding cogs of an obsolete assembly line.

"It won't take a moment," Hannibal says.

He takes the slow tilt of Beinert's head as assent. The woman, Beinert's wife, has begun to call again, the pitch rising. Hannibal does not follow her voice. He follows the growing scent of blood, blossoming in his nose, gaining reflective complexity like a Mandelbrot set.

It is headiest inside the room, where a pale and skeletal woman slumps beside a mattress and box spring set directly on the floor. She is gravely ill, as Beinert said, but this mortality slid below her skin long before the cancer that now consumes it. She has been dying for years, but only now is given the mechanism.

A man, in his mid-thirties but with hairline already receding, lies on the bed. The skin is split in a starburst pattern over his left temporal bone and still oozes sluggish blood. His mother's halfhearted ministrations with a damp rag do nothing. It is not only daylight filtered through the bed sheet serving as a curtain that makes them both appear gray, clay-like.

"Who are you?" the woman asks.

"I am a doctor. I'd like to take a look at your son, if I could."

"Who called you?" she asks.

Crawford steps inside the door, brandishes his badge. "FBI. We spoke to you a few days ago."

"I want you to leave," Beinert's wife says.

"Mother," says the man on the bed. It could be a warning or a plea.

Will enters the room, takes in the wounded man and the nature of the wound. Hannibal turns to meet his eyes and knows that he knows.

"How did you hurt yourself?" Hannibal asks the man on the bed.

"He fell off a ladder. This is my husband's house. You have no business here," the woman says. "Lewis-"

Hannibal motions with his head, a gesture intended for Will.

"Jack," Will says, "the closet."

"You stay out of there," says Beinert's wife, but she is far too weak to rise.

As the accordion doors whine, the full redolence of the blood fills the room. On the carpet just inside is a heap of clothing, drenched red. A gloved agent pulls at the still-dripping pile. A flash of metal, and a thick-handled knife tumbles out, along with a small and still-bloody lump of human tissue.

"Jesus Christ!" It rolls to the edge of the agent's boot, and he jumps back.

Even Crawford is attuned enough to the circumstance to know at once what it is: the emergent life cut out of the body of Caroline Fitzsimmons.

Crawford draws his gun, training it on the man in the bed, and the other agents follow suit. "Stay right where you are."

From the other room, Lewis Beinert has set to wailing-an inhuman howl underscored by the pounding of his twisted hands on the wall, again and again. His wife is sobbing, her shoulders shaking but ruined tear ducts pitifully dry.

No one but Hannibal notices that Will has fallen to his knees, one sleeve of the bloody shirt extended toward him from the closet floor, accusatory in its inanimate reaching.


	7. Chapter 7

"He said he was trying to cleanse the wickedness of the world," Will tells Hannibal, in his office, two days later. "Josiah Beinert actually thought he was doing good."

"'I lay the sins of the fathers upon the children, until the third and fourth generation,'" Hannibal says. "He was bred to do what he did. Whether his parents acknowledged it or not."

Will rubs at a spot on his jaw until the skin below the beard stubble is red. His face is a topography of light and deep shadow, putting Hannibal briefly in mind of the Christ figure dangling in its niche in the Almighty Hands Church. He looks like he has not slept since his viewing of it.

"Wickedness isn't subjective, is it? I mean, not unless you're insane," Will says. "Lewis Beinert and his wife could differentiate between preaching some...divine wrath, and actually carrying it out."

"On the contrary," Hannibal says. "The combination of total faith and free will is a cognitive contradiction. It becomes a poison, which they passed on to their son. If the Book of James tells us that faith without works is dead, how is one to truly differentiate between asking for God's intercession and becoming an instrument of it?"

Will's groan is muffled in his hands. How many cries of anguish he must have put there! If sorrow had weight, Will's hands would be heavy indeed.

"Can a thing not know that it's evil?" Will asks.

Hannibal gives a smile to the air before him where Will cannot see. "Is it time for that conversation on religion?"

Will chokes out a laugh like sob. "I'm struggling to understand where I fall on the spectrum after Caroline Fitzsimmons."

"On a spectrum of evil? You are blameless," Hannibal says. "There are mistakes, oversights for which we pay an emotional toll, but for which we cannot hold ourselves responsible lest we allow its oppression to paralyze us."

"The trials of Job, huh?"

"Not in the least," Hannibal says. "You and I both know there is no God coming in the last extremity to set things right."

If his affect had been measured despair in the prior session, Will has reversed it. He paces, almost manic, around the perimeter of the office, an agitated body orbiting Hannibal in an erratic path, flouting his gravity.

"I should have come to you," Will says.

Hannibal savors the words for a moment, letting them glide over his palate. "Alana is more than a competent psychiatrist. She is an excellent friend."

"That's not the point," Will says. "I tried to kiss her. Again. I didn't want to-I mean, I did-_I do_. But I couldn't stop myself. And she knew it."

"What do you mean?"

"She pushed me away. Told me, 'this is not you.'"

"But you are afraid that it might be," Hannibal says.

"No," Will says. "I know it's not. I was tired and it was...fucking stupid. But, god, I wanted to hold on to her life. Like I almost wanted her to be Caroline Fitzsimmons. To cling to that life and not let go."

"I understand."

"She doesn't. I couldn't explain it. I don't know if she wants to talk to me again," says Will.

"Alana will come back," says Hannibal. "You haven't lost her friendship. Those who know you well return to you. Your light is too insistent."

"Like moths to a flame," says Will, stopping in front of the case containing the misericorde, examining the print hanging above it.

"And do you burn, Will?" Hannibal asks, knowing the answer.

There is only a heavy sigh. Hannibal rises and walks to Will's side.

"This is new," Will says, indicating the print. It shows a woman's face, the pencil lines spidery scratches, crosshatches lending depth. The woman's eyes are closed, mouth slightly open, her expression serene.

"Yes, I've just added it to my collection." That it is one of his own drawings Hannibal does not mention. "It is the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa."

Will's frown is reflected back at Hannibal in the pristine glass. "It doesn't look ecstatic."

"Her ecstasy is all interior, ensconced in her mind. The touch of God is a curse; many mystics go mad. A steep price to pay for communion with the divine."

"It looks like death," Will says.

Hannibal smiles. "Ecstasy, agony, death, pleasure, and suffering-they are all very close in human experience."

Will stares. In the glass, from Hannibal's vantage so close to Will's shoulder, his open and haunted eyes overlay Saint Teresa's closed lids in the drawing.

When he sees Hannibal's eyes, bright and hard, reflected in the glass behind him, he lowers his own gaze.

Hannibal leans in just a little, reaching past Will's elbow to open the lid of the box in which the dagger rests. "There are times, though, to choose between them," he says. "You went to Alana, you came to me. I cannot offer you life, the life that was taken, that you so desperately want." He pauses. "But I will not turn you away."

Will extends his hand, slow and buoyant in the thick air of the office, and closes the lid of the box. Another sigh, and he lets his head fall back, eyes closing, brow furrowed deep.

His curls brush Hannibal's temple and it is decided. Hannibal presses the ridge of his cheekbone against the line of Will's jaw and inhales deeply, at last taking the fullness of his fervid scent.

Will turns his head away, makes a sound of protest, but it rattles and falls in the enclosure of Hannibal's proximity. Hannibal steps against him, puts a hand to Will's cheek and crooks two fingers between his lips, turning his face again so it aligns flush with the imperturbable image of Saint Teresa. Pushes the fingers past Will's teeth into his slack, warm mouth. He is so receptive as to be nearly catatonic; Hannibal feels a trickle of warm saliva slide between his fingers and into his palm.

Will makes no move to stop Hannibal when he unbuckles his belt, slips past button and zipper with deft hands, nor does he try to prevent the unceremonial pushing of cloth out of the way of bare skin. Hannibal feels the man's breathing quicken, tastes the unmistakable intertwining scents of Will and of arousal, all the way to the back of his throat.

It is heady, but Hannibal is nothing if not practiced in restraint.

In keeping with his lassitude, Will does not attempt to step out of the clothing now pooled around his ankles, but he lets Hannibal nudge his legs as far apart as the constraining garments will allow.

It is all he needs. Hannibal removes his fingers from Will's mouth, drawing a shining parabola in the air between lips and digits before the connective strand of saliva breaks and falls away. These wet fingertips he lowers between Will's buttocks, finding his mark and pressing inward, efficient but not cruel. Hannibal draws out the long moments until two fingers are fully seated within Will's body, then begins unbuckling his own belt.

Freed, Hannibal moves a hand to Will's hip, draws him back with firm insistence against his fingers as he moves. The reflection of Will's closed eyes hovers over the cheeks of the placid saint in the drawing, each face mirroring transcendence to the other.

Will makes a soft sound when the fingers are removed. Encircled by Hannibal's arms he feels oddly boneless, borne up by surrender.

Hannibal spits soundlessly into his own palm, ever polite. The face he sees in the glass ripples with unexpected pain as he pushes in, but Will's body is too accepting to maintain its tense indignation for long. Hannibal waits as long as he needs to, or as long as he estimates the need to be, then begins to move.

A cloud of sound and scent enrobes them. Will's breath comes in hoarse gasps, rhythmic, the contrapuntal melody to Hannibal's thrusts.

At long last, stirring from his torpor, Will moves a tentative hand to touch himself. Hannibal slaps it viciously away, and takes Will's cock in his own hand. It is less the fact of Will's hesitant pleasure-seeking and more that single touch that informs Hannibal that Will is not pliant and resigned, but submerged in experience, the pursuit of sensation more fluid-but no less fervent-than his own.

Hannibal pushes upward as he works Will's cock, lifting the man onto his toes and then settling him back into the cradle of his hips.

Again. Again.

Finally, a cry stutters free from Will's mouth, visible ecstasy breaks in reflection over Saint Teresa's face, and Will orgasms, painting the glass box on its rosewood stand. Blood-warm liquid spills onto Hannibal's fingers.

Will's chest heaves; Hannibal is hyperfocused and almost does not hear the question whispered amid the gasping breaths.

"_Is this mercy?_"

For a second he expects his concentration to shatter, but instead Will's words distill it, honing its bright edge to blinding. He tenses, shudders, and comes-teeth clenched, every muscle from heel to head drawn bowstring-tight, fingers curled in the fine hairs at Will's nape. But for the closeness, he would be laid bare, for the briefest of moments.

And yet he is shielded. Entangled.

And then he regains his self-possession, forcibly regulating his own heartbeat and breathing. Ensuring a measured voice before he answers.

"No," Hannibal says. "But there may come a time when you wish it could be."


End file.
